REVIEW: Magic Is Might, Part 1

[Thank you for visiting The Wrock Snob and reading this article! I’d love for you to jump right into the reviewy goodness, but first there is some unfortunate business to take care of. It is not in my nature to tell you specifically what or what not to buy and who to support – I tell you what I thought about an album, and if my tastes seem to align with yours, you might want to heed my suggestions. However, I must take this time to personally exhort that you do not monetarily support the bands The Remus Lupins or Ministry of Magic. The full reasons are unsettling and possibly triggering, so please proceed with caution, but if you want the full details click here. Simply put, it has been revealed that certain member/s of both bands did destructive, upsetting, and highly problematic things. While I can see the value of reviewing art no matter what the artist did on a grand society-level scale, I cannot morally allow myself to condone the financial support of these monsters, nonetheless exhorting people to do so. Now it is entirely possible this copypasta’d retroactive warning was placed on a negative review, making this sidebar somewhat moot, but I still feel it necessary to make these matters clear. Again, for full details and rumination click here, otherwise, please enjoy the article.]

And now for 6000 words of blather and nitpicking! For realsies this time! And only 5 months after everyone stopped caring!

Let’s just jump right in, shall we? With the last article, we already covered my general thoughts on the album, so let’s just start with the first song on Ministry of Magic’s Magic Is Might, “The Hero, Pt. 2”.

Like I said in my very first review, despite my poor opinion of Onward & Upward, I was still looking forward to the next MoM album, and the track listing and album art did nothing but further my optimism – the dark, American-edition OotP cover art-inspired album cover, a title that alludes to one of the darkest parts of the series, and the fact that the first song was apparently a sequel to the very first song on the first MoM album, The Triwizard LP, “The Hero”, a song that has a lot of nostalgic resonance for me, and one I still listen to fairly often (the minute-long instrumental intro is one I hold up as one of the most triumphant and fitting album openers, ever).  So, imagine my disappointment when, after downloading the album, I click “play”, and am treated to the word “hero” sung over and over… and over.  Oh, and the phrase “I don’t wanna be one” is in there as well.

One of my biggest problems with O&U was that the lyric writing was often sub-par to the point of inanity, and “The Hero, Pt. 2” was not giving any indications that things had changed.  Look, repetition can be fine and even really damn good, both musically and lyrically, but you can’t just replace a chorus with one word repeated over and over – it doesn’t mean anything.  It doesn’t serve to effectively tell a story or get a point across.  It’d be like if Rush’s “The Trees” consisted mostly of Geddy Lee just singing the word “unions” over and over, occasionally overlaid with the phrase “rather lame metaphor” every now and then.  And you know what?  It’s even possible that it could have potentially worked, if not for the fact that the very insubstantial message brought across by the “chorus” DOESN’T EVEN FIT WITH CANON.  Heck, the entire song makes practically no sense.

Harry DOES want to be a hero, or at the very least, he would choose, eleven times out of ten, to be a hero in place of someone else being a hero.  Sure, he does feel some trepidation about dying – who wouldn’t?  But his parents, godfather, and favorite teacher, as well as thinking about making out with Ginny, steadies his resolve.  Plus, the rest of the song, the few bits that AREN’T repeated lines, don’t make any sense either.  The song is apparently about some hard-to-define time at the end of DH, either before or after Harry sacrifices himself, but neither makes sense:

Faster and faster, I run from the scene

At no point is Harry running in the entire final few chapters of Deathly Hallows – he walks to meet his fate, and is carried by Hagrid out of the forest.  So, the lyrics make no sense in terms of canon, aren’t true to the character, and are blitheringly repetitive.  As for the music side of things, it’s… okay, I guess, but it’s hard to find something catchy when it’s just THE SAME DAMN WORD OVER AND OVER, with little to no context, and you feel like an idiot singing along.  The ending section, though still highly repetitive (This ends now / This ends now / I’ll never lose it all but / This ends now, etc.) is actually kinda catchy, and the very very end is kinda cool.  Still, a merely passable final thirty-five seconds doesn’t make the full song anywhere near worth it.  One caveat: as with almost all of the songs on this album, there are some interesting things going on in the instrumental section, and I think an instrumentals-only version of Magic Is Might would be both fascinating, and a lot of fun (especially with really neat little sections like the chiptune bit at 2:15).  Make no mistake, there is some real musical and technical skill being shown off in the background, but as with most of the album, the vocals] melodies and lyrics make it impossible to appreciate.

I almost shut off “My Baby” right away, and not just because the title gave me considerable pause – the music was just so damn… happy… that I wanted to vomit.  However, I realized that my personal hatred for sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows shouldn’t be held against MoM, and the countless people who like such things.  And after all, there is definitely a place, and even a need for light, happy pop music, as long as the lyrics aren’t too terrible.  Unfortunately…

You’re so cute!

NEXT!

Seriously though, I did manage to listen to the whole song, and it’s… it’s bad, folks.  It’s really, really bad.  And I really can’t understand how they managed to eff up a love song to McGonagall and NOT make it funny.  Well, it is funny… but I suspect not entirely intentionally so.  Now, there are two ways this song could have been funny, and it fails in both ways.  The first way is by being over-the-top, blisteringly idiotic, and while it can get close, it was crippled before it even left the gates in this respect.  Why?  Because, I’m sorry MoM, but you can’t make an intentionally stupid/overly sappy love song if half of your career is built on stupid/overly sappy love songs.  It’d be like if Obama made an announcement that he would be once again naively caving to the Republican minority instead of being a President and, you know, getting shit done, and then later said “Hey, guys, I was obviously just kidding!”  You see, the problem is, NO ONE WOULD BELIEVE HIM.

Secondly, a love song to Minerva McGonagall is NOT inherently funny – there are a multitude of easy ways to make it funny, but the premise on its own is not a mirth mine.  Now, if it’s a love song from a student, that’s funny.  Or from certain teachers, like Filch or Trelawney, that could be really funny.  But the song contains ABSOLUTELY NO CONTEXT.  There are no hints given as to from whom the song is sung, not in general (student, peer, death eater, shop keeper, goblin, centaur, aardvark, etc.), and definitely not in specific.  As for the music, the main instrumental riff IS pretty fun, if almost painfully so, but the lyrics are so terrible, and the melody is only so-so.  And the thing is, I do believe MoM MEANT this to be ironic, but when you fail at being bad on purpose…

So, far, my thoughts on MiM have been that the instrumentation is highly competent and even interesting and fun, but it’s marred by atrocious lyrics sung in rather uninteresting melodies.  With that in mind, let’s dive into the lyrics of the third song on the album, “The Curse”:

The moon is out again

It always leaves a shadow

Of everything it shines upon

…..O-okay… then… Well, that was unusually factual and informative… but seriously, who does Ministry of Magic think they are – TMBG? What, is this a deleted track from Here Comes Science?  Actually, oddly factual and declarative openings beside, both lyrically and musically, this is hands down the best track on the album.  Firstly, musically, the chorus is (for once) fun as all hell, a real party-pumper that will be sure to become a live MoM setlist staple, and the verses are, while obviously less exciting, nice pallet cleansers, and let’s face it, a song can’t, or at least in most cases shouldn’t be all high energy all the time, unless it’s a minute or whatever.  Also, the differing tones and velocities of the chori and verses serve as brilliant parallels to the lyrics (OH SNAP AN ACTUALLY SEMI-COMPETENT TRANSITION, MARRED BY UNNECESSARY SELF-AWARE PARENTHETICAL STATEMENTS).

Speaking of which, the lyrics are unquestionably the best on the album, and some of the most interesting lyrics in all of wrock to examine the plight of werewolf, by both using completely different general methods from The Remus Lupins and Remus and the Lupins, as well as tackling specifics never really tackled by either, or any other band I’ve heard (caveat: I’ve yet to listen to The Rest Is Silence, and I know I really should… it’s on my list… also, I haven’t heard that hard-to-track-down album/EP that RatL made that isn’t their 2007 EP of the month club EP).  You see, while both Remus bands tackle the character of Remus differently, and both methods have their merits (though I personally like RatL’s teacher-focused version more than TRL’s rather fanficy [though nonetheless interesting] version), “The Curse” does something that is both obvious and rarely seen in werewolf songs – tackling the nitty-gritty about the actual transformation and how it works and what it’s like, as well as how much it sucks, while RatL tackles specifics but not the whole, like having to eat rats, hating the moon, hanging out with other werewolves, etc., and TRL tackles stuff like teenage!Remus’s relationships with those around him (as well as adult!Remus to a lesser extent), and the interesting social stigmas and things like that that arise from being a werewolf.  The one song from either of these bands that I can think of that comes close to what “The Curse” does is TRL’s fantastic “Origin” (which apparently has no non-live youtube videos or similar, unfortunately).

But more so than just exploring the hell that would be that transformation, “The Curse” explores it from a fascinating angle – that of the wolf.  Or at least it does in the fast-paced, frenetic chorus, while the more laid-back, even apprehensive verses are all from the side of the “were“, as it were.  For the first couple of listens, I absolutely loved the pump-it-up chorus, but found the verses surrounded the chori to be rather dull.  However, I eventually got the absolutely brilliant lyrical/musical connections that make for one of the most cleverly put together songs in all of wizard rock.  The verses are slower, claustrophobic, and dripping in melancholy, if not entirely catchy, but that works for setting the mood – you aren’t really supposed to remember the melody of this section, but rather the overall emotional tone.  Lyrically, they’re from the POV of a werewolf just before or thinking about transforming.

The first verse is especially good as Luke Conard gives what might be his best vocal performance on a MoM album to date.  Then, in the pre-chorus (which is like pre-cum but slightly less messy) the melody gets a bit catchier, the background takes melodies that were in the background and shunts them into the spotlight (again, let me reiterate that a instrumentals-only version of this album would be REALLY REALLY COOL), and the lyrics become self-resigned to the inevitability of the curse, a neat little bit of break down, and then we hit the chorus, which does something I have never seen (heard, whatever) done in wrock song – it forces the listener to be looking out through the eyes of a turned werewolf.  The music is catchy, pumped, and fun as all hell, and brilliantly, it’s actually sort of terrible stuff being talked about in the lyrics (cuz, you know, werewolves, are, well, wolves, and the chase and hunt and kill and eat things), but you just can’t help but giddily sing/shout along. And then BAM! we’re thrust back into the verses and reminded of the incredible pathos that such a disease would incur, and then the song’s cycle begins again, mimicking the lunar cycle it’s lyrically about. All-in-all a great song, and while not quite the “Lightning Struck Tower” this album desperately needed, it’s close.  Plus, let me put it this way – if I had to choose one of those two songs to be played from the heavens while being chased by angry fangirls, “LST” would just get me pumped and moving fast better, but “The Curse” has much more artistic merit – it’s no “Phoenix Lament” (the most beautiful song MoM has ever made and one of the greatest wizard rock songs of all time), but it’s up there…

Next up, we have “Lily”, which isn’t a wizard rock song.  Period.  NEXT!

“Don’t Leave” starts with the best, most pumpin’ bit of instrumentation on the entire album – wait, what?  What do you mean I can’t just state what is in my opinion incontrovertible truth (just like the evidence of the Dark Lord’s return) and then move on? Make valid points?  What the fuck are you on about?  Wait… *snicker*… “backing up assertions”… heh… “displaying actual knowledge of the album in particular, or even music in general”… *snort*… “not being an asshole who barely even posts” GUFFAW! Heh – I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time – thanks for that, I mean it.  Look, you’re obviously new around here kid – lemme tell you how it works – wait what?  What contract?  In whose writing?  MINE?  In blood?!  When the hell did I sign that?  …I did no such thing – especially not with a goat! I prefer ocelots.  O-oh… my… those are quite convincing pictures.  Hmmmm… I must have either been really drunk, or really, really sober.  Hunh.  Oh well, time to put on my reviewing dungarees…

So, “Lily”.  ….Yeah…  Okay, I’ll make this as short and painless as possible – “Lily” is not a wizard rock song, is not a Harry Potter song, it is not a meta-wrock song, it is not even a MoM song.  It’s an all Caps Song.  And not even a very good All Caps song at that (though granted the only All Caps song I really liked was “Summer of ’09”, and that’s only because the main bit rips off “Frog’s Theme” from Chrono Trigger so much it should be speaking in an anachronistic Ye Olde Times accent)!  Firstly, why it’s an All Caps song – it’s just Luke and Kristina – pretty obvious there.  But someone in the comments pointed out that that’s no reason to exclude a song from MoM-dom, you wouldn’t do the same to “This Town” for being a Luke/Ryan only thing, right?  And part of me agrees – far be it from me to say that all Ministry songs need all 17 or whatever guys contributing, and I can appreciate wanting to temper a vocally full album with some songs with just two voices (because a MoM song with only one voice would just be really, really weird).  Plus, I have nothing against Kristina on Ministry songs – she was the best part of Goodbye Privet Drive‘s titular track (though a voice I instinctually associate with Annoying, Stuck-Up, Yet Strangely Likeable Slytherin Pureblood playing the part of Hermione Granger is always a bit of a mental leap I need to take).  But on the other hand, Luke and Ryan don’t have a band with just them in it, as far as I’m aware, and if they do, then Luke Conard is officially a collab slut.

However, all of that would be moot and I would happily accept “Lily” as a Ministry of Magic song, exclusion of 4/5th, I mean 6ths, whatever, another one keeps popping up like they were fucking Dittos… actually Dittos can’t reproduce with each other… ooh, let’s just say that that “fucking” was actually a verb and not an… adjective? Maybe? Somebody help me out here.  Anyways, I would happily except “Lily” as a Ministry of Magic song, it being only Luke and Kristina notwithstanding (which is one of the clumsiest most WTF words in the English language)… IF IT WASN’T FOR THE FACT THAT IT ISN’T WIZARD ROCK.  I defy any of you to prove to me that “Lily” is anything more than a rather bland fill-in-the-blanks love song that has nothing to do with any characters we know from cannon, much less the ones this song is apparently supposed to be about, and I can only tell what the songs supposed to be about because of the fucking title!  Seriously, I welcome you to speak up – anyone who can shed light on why ANYONE would think that this is at all about Lily and, assumedly James, but for all we know it’s about Sirius or Snape or Remus or even fucking Peter.  Hell, for all we know it’s about Lily Potter, not Lily Evans!  In fact, I might actually buy that, since we know fuck-all about her character except that she’s Ginny, again.  Because apparently Jo had just flat-out ran out of ideas by that point.

Anyway, allow me to expand on this like I just grabbed a P-Balloon (incidentally, getting all the Dragon Coins in that fucking level is next to impossible – that and the fucking Sunken Ghost Ship).  You see –

WARNING – OPINION CHANGE IMMINENT

Wait, what the hell? Christ this article is getting all meta-narrativey as hell. Okay, instead of doing some “cute” thing like a few paragraphs ago, let me be direct: I had assumed this song was about James and Lily, but was insanely obtuse, and didn’t reference a single thing we know from canon about them, which admittedly, isn’t a lot, but hey, in that case, at least drop a seeker reference or something in there, y’know?  However, youtube comments inform me that this is a Snape/Lily song, and in which case, I need to revise my opinion completely.  You see, I was prepared to argue that this was simply an All Caps song that didn’t feature robots or WoW (which I just noticed is MoM upside down…) that they just threw into the album and titled “Lily” to pad things out.  However, if this song is actually supposed to be about Lily and Snape then I need to revise my position.  If this is true, then MoM are not, as I previously thought, lazy writers – they’re bad writers.

NOW I will expand like a Super Mario World reference, et cetera, et cetera.  I can now see why so many people glommed on to the… Snily? And the other would be… Lames? Limes? Jaly? Anyway, I can see why people pegged the song as Snape/Lily at first – with lines like “You are still my strongest memory” being a big tip-off, as well as “I knew straight away / On that day”, which is obviously referring to the whole playground scene, and while yes, they were only 10-11 yrs old, so he probably didn’t know he was instantly in love… of course, on the other hand, look at Ginny… on the other other hand she was probably just an early bloomer, and males in our species tend to hit puberty later… Anyway, this would be a big tip-off and I would be rightly called an idiot for not getting that this is a Snape/Lily, okay, Snily song if not for one fact – LILY SINGS THE AFOREMENTIONED LINE.  So, if this is a Snape/Lily song, it MAKES NO GORRAM SENSE.

In fact, IN GENERAL, if this is a Snape/Lily song, IT MAKES NO GORRAM SENSE.  Let’s just break it down line by line, shall we?

You are still my strongest memory
Whenever I close my eyes I see you clearly
Everytime my heart just skips a beat
Whenever you say my name I need you with me

Okay, leaving aside the confusing time dilation going on (how can Lily be calling Snape’s name if she’s now only a memory, as established in the opening line with the word “still”?), this is pretty straightforward Snily stuff from Snape’s point of view. Maybe with not as much angst and stuff as I’d like, but hey, there did have to be some times Snape actually felt… like, happy or optimistic or something. I guess. Okay, so far, so not terrible.

I am so nervous, I’ve thought for ages what to say
It doesn’t matter anyway

Okay, Snape being nervous, and pessimistic, I understand completely. Maybe he’s about to ask Lils out on a date, finally?

You are so ruthless, let me pursue it
You come around and I fall in love.

….WAT. What? What does this even mean?  On the list of character traits that describe Lily based on what little we know from canon, this is the LAST adjective I’d think to put on the list.  Hell, no matter which male this is about, this doesn’t make sense!  If it’s about James, that’s bullshit because she didn’t even like him for, like, ever, so she wouldn’t be “ruthless” in her pursuit of him, as How Airplanes Fly reminds us, it was the other way around.  And if it is about Snape then it makes even less sense, because, I hate to remind you all of this, LILY. DID NOT. LOVE. SNAPE.  Now, yes, she loved him dearly as a friend, and I’m sure there was a time she would have been open to being more than that with him, but IT NEVER ACTUALLY HAPPENED.  Or in the MoMverse, it did happen, just the same way that Harry met a man whose name was Albus, amirite?  Also, what does the line “You come around and I fall in love” mean?  Snape loved Lily LONG before she ever came around to loving him AND SHE NEVER CAME AROUND TO LOVING HIM.  Or does it mean that Lily came around the corner and he instantly fell in love at her sight? Or that she finger-banged herself and came so hard she went flying backwards, circumnavigating the entire globe, possibly with some Superman-style time travel shit? That’d be cool.

Next we have the aforementioned pre-chorus, which is like pre-cum, except… wait, I’ve already done that one, haven’t I? Damn.  This is the whole “I knew straight away / On that day” shit that’s sung from Lily’s perspective, and I’ve already covered that.  Then we repeat this first verse, which is actually the chorus, and this time Kristina/Lily starts singing as well.  Now, while musically I have nothing against that – harmonies are coo and all that jazz, but from the perspective of These Are Characters Singing Their Actual Thoughts And Feelings, it makes NO GORRAM SENSE FOR LILY TO BE SINGING THIS.  Now, it didn’t make much sense either back when I thought it was James/Lily, because you know, dead people don’t have memories, but maybe it was an obtuse play on the whole beyond the veil/resurrection stone stuff.  But let me state again – LILY. DID NOT. ROMANTICALLY LOVE. SNAPE.

Okay almost done (besides some repeated choruses and stuff):

You must admit it, you feel more different everyday.

I won’t even try to figure out what this could be referring to. Snape not being an asshole anymore? But even that doesn’t make sense, because he wasn’t an asshole really when they were at school, not until 5th/6th year when he lost his way, and even then he wasn’t really a true asshole, that wasn’t until he was an adult, and his prefrontal cortex had fully grown, and he was fully capable of rational thought, AND HE WAS STILL AN ASSHOLE (I have pity and sympathy for young Snape, but nothing but contempt for adult Snape).

But in such an exciting way!

THIS LINE.  THIS FUCKING LINE.  I don’t care who this bloody song is about, but this line pisses me off.  Why?  Because when sung by Kristina it is quite possibly the most sappy, sickening-sweet vocal performance of six words I’ve ever heard in my life – and I grew up on Telletubies! Thought they didn’t really sing things that were actual words, really… anyway…  It’s so sickeningly overly saccharine that that one line makes it so that I would rather listen to “Butterflies“. No, wait, on second thought, I’d rather watch “Crush On You“, though admittedly mostly for the incomprehensible rap/pillow fight scene at the end…

You are the man for me
Me and you meant to be

You see, it’s stuff like this that made me always assume it was supposed to be a James/Lily song.  While with the memory stuff I can see how people would jump to Snape, lines like those above made it so in my mind, I’d never ever consider Snape, because, you know, LILY WOULD NEVER SAY THAT. Maybe, MAYBE she might have thought that when she was like, 13 or something, but they’d never actually sing a duet like this.

I would do anything for you.

Like let him call you “mudblood”? Ba dum pish.  So yes, in short (something that’s apparently impossible for me), I was originally going to let “Lily” off with the relatively light conclusion that it’s simply not a wizard rock song.  Now I am forced to change my conclusion to either it is just not a wrock song, or it’s an absolutely terrible wizard rock song that has absolutely nothing to do with the characters it’s supposed to be about, completely changes their personalities, motivations, and characters, and makes no effort to reveal why this song was even made.  To elucidate on my final point, I’m sure some will pipe up and claim “Hey, you say you like musical fanfic, so what’s wrong with this? It’s just musical Snape/Lily fanfic!”

Well, firstly, with only the barest of details to hint that this actually is about Snape and Lily, you can’t really justify that claim.  To make a wrock song that goes against canon, especially when it’s done in a serious, non-silly manner (unlike stuff like “Draco and Harry” or “Afterlife”), ESPECIALLY when it not just changes, but completely REVERSES one of the core truths of the entire series (Snape loved Lily but loved power too, made some huge mistakes, and kept doing all sorts of stupid stuff for her, and she loved him dearly as a friend, but moved on and found happiness with James), you need to ground everything in specifics pretty solidly.  Again, some specifics, like talking about greasy hair or something would have helped, but in this case that wouldn’t be enough.  We need some solid lines that point to this being an intentional reversal of canon, and not just Ministry forgetting how canon went again, which isn’t entirely implausible, given their track record (okay, that’s enough of harping on that song – to their credit they fixed it in the version that’s on the rather excellent Acoustiatus).

My astute readers will have no doubt noticed that in the preceeding 2466 words (holy shit, I really did lie when I said this would be quick) nowhere did I comment on the music.  So, briefly (and I mean it this time): It would take a monumentally impressive piece of music to make me look past these lyrics, and unfortunately, “Lily” is not such a song.  There are some bits between the verses where there’s some noodling on the synth flute or whatever that’s sorta fun, but beyond that, for an album that contains a lot of really interesting and/or fun instrumentals, “Lily” is a very disappointing, and ultimately bland track.  It’s just monotonous and boring, and the fact that the lyrics just plain suck and sometimes the vocal performances make me want to vomit sugar-encrusted rainbows doesn’t help at all.  “Lily” is far from the worst song on the album, because while the lyrics are pretty terrible from a canon perspective, they’re only just below average as just lyrics if you pretend it’s not wizard rock, and at least they contain more than one word.

So anyway.  “Don’t Leave” starts with the best, most pumpin’ bit of instrumentation on the entire album, and this instrumentation is part of what makes this the second best song on the album.  See, I earlier said that no song on this album quite reaches the same levels of the lone star in the darkness of the previous album that was “Lightning Struck Tower”, but both “The Curse” and “Don’t Leave” get close, but for different reasons.  See, LST was the perfect marriage of awesome, pumped-up vocals, and frenetic instrumentation, all interwoven with this richly dark atmosphere enhanced by the lyrics.  “The Curse” has amazingly fun vocals during its chori, and while the instrumentation certainly does nothing to detract from that, it doesn’t really enhance them either, but that’s not really a complaint – the song was built around the vocals being the star, I understand that.

On the other hand, “Don’t Leave” has the best instrumentals in the whole album, at least in the chori and transitional bits, ESPECIALLY the opening.  I seriously sometimes just loop those first 11 seconds because it’s so damn fun and dancey and what MoM music can be at its best.  Then the verses start.  Musically, they’re… okay, not bad by any stretch of the means, but only barely catchy, though I do like the instrumental callbacks to the main instrumental riff that punctuate every two lines – nice touch.  Anyway, the lyrics are… okay, again, like the music not bad, and unlike the next song they don’t just sit there, doing no ill but also doing no good and just being a general waste of space.  The lyrics do a competent job of getting into the heads of the trio during The World’s Worst Camping Trip Ever, without actually probing beyond the surface emotions or getting into any really deep or meaningful territory (not saying they’re bad, just extremely adequate)… that is until the chorus, when the awesome main instrumental melody returns, the vocals get super catchy, and the writing gets much better.

And I know it’s been

Such a long time

Since we’ve just been friends

And not soldiers on

The frontline of a war

That we were born into

As stated many times before, my favorite lyrics in wizard rock are those that make me see canon in a whole new light – and NOT the way “Lily” made me “see canon” (shudder).  Stuff like the exploration of Snape and Dumbledore’s frenemieship in JFF’s “Decisions To Make”.  That’s part of why I love this chorus so much (the other part being it’s fun as all hell musically) – I really like the idea of the trio, and really, their entire generation being “born into war”.  It’s a cool idea because it’s not actually immediately obvious.  The war doesn’t start until Book 5, really, and there aren’t any “frontlines” at all until Book 6.  Yet, on the other hand, the Dark Lord’s return was inevitable, and many on both sides were preparing for his return, or continuing their work in the war, whatever it may have been.  And as for the frontlines, those weren’t out wherever the Auror Department was, or were giants were causing chaos, no the frontlines were in Hogwarts, or on the Express – the social interactions between the students really is what made or broke the war.  Hell, the entire war really came down to two kids wrestling on a rug! Now, some of you may be itching to point out that almost nothing in this paragraph had really anything to do with wizard rock in general, or this song in particular, but that’s exactly my point – good wizard rock should inspire someone to think whole paragraphs or more about canon in a way they never had before, and “Don’t Leave” is good wizard rock.

Unfortunately, it isn’t great wizard rock.  While the verses truly aren’t bad, the choruses are just so fucking fun that the verses just seem like dull slogs by comparison, and there isn’t even any cool artsy reason for the slow choruses like in “The Curse”.  Also, while I love the vocal melodies in the chori, the vocal performances in the whole piece are not the best on the album (especially on the third verse), and there’s a few mixing issues here or there, but they smack more of something that was either overlooked or couldn’t be fixed, in contrast to the horrendous intentional mixing flubs in Onward & Upward, and I much rather weather the former than the latter.  Or the ladder.  Fucking hate those things.  Anyway, despite these flaws, “Don’t Leave” is still a good song, and one I hope gets adapted into MoM’s regular setlists, just because the instrumentals are so fucking cool.

Next up, “This Town”, a song which I  really just can’t be bothered to write much about.  It’s not a bad song necessarily, and it’s not a good song either.  It’s just a not very interesting song.  It just sort of sits there, like a live bloated pigeon on your dinner plate – sure it’s technically a filling poultry dinner, but it’s also not really food, and you just can’t care enough to shove it into the fire, or to shoo it from your plate, so you just end up sitting there, staring at it as it stares at you, big, unintelligent eyes blinking stupidly every minute or so.  Okay, let me describe it for a little bit as if it were a song, which it is, and not a large pigeon, which it is not (for one, large pigeons are not yet available through digital distribution, how I obtained my copy of MiM).  This song is just… uninteresting.  It isn’t necessarily bland or boring per se, though it does teeter off into those gray alleys a few times, but it just doesn’t cause interest in the listener.  A song about the action-packed scene of breaking into and out of Gringotts should be fun and fast-paced, maybe even bombastic – something along the lines of “Lightning Struck Tower” or “Old Enough To Die”, or at the very least something interesting.  I just can’t be arsed to care about this song.

Here are the few things I can think of to say: My main problem with this song is that sonically, it’s very cluttered – there’s just too much going on, and while that could have made for a painful, if intriguing mess, it just turns everything sonically into a monochrome mush – like when you mix all your paints together, you don’t get a spazzy rainbow, you get fucking brown or puce or something like that.  I like the opening instrumentation, and the bit from 1:40 to 2:00 is the only time the multi-layered instrumentation really works, all the pieces seem to fit together and belong there.  But otherwise, it’s just too much.  Now, far be it from me to say all songs should be minimalist pieces featuring only acoustic guitars in an empty room and the occasional castanet, and I really like songs that have an aurally “rich” or “full” song.  But this song is too full.  It’s the difference between a nice lean cut of flank steak, with some mashed potatoes, maybe some peas, and something bubbly to wash it down, and taking on the 72-oz steak challenge – it’s just too bloody much to possibly be appetizing, or any good.

Christ, this song is inspiring some weird metaphors.  I must be hungry or something.  One last note one the music – the only time I liked the sound of the song as a whole when there was singing going on was during the 2:40 to 3:00 section, in which the instrumentation was massively scaled back, and we could focus and a few melodies and counterpoints instead of OH GOD TIDAL WAVE OF INCOMPREHENSIBLE SOUND.  As for the writing, it gives a decent summary of the events and has some nice little rhyme schemes, but there isn’t much else.  There are a couple nice lyrical twists, like the breaking into/out of callbacks/reversal, and I like the “shallow graves” line a lot.  On the other hand, there’s no mention of what actually happened in Gringott’s, and while I sort of like it, using the song itself as a bookend to an event that isn’t described by the song, on the other hand, I really like the scene in Bellatrix’s vault, so there’s a bit of personal disappointment there.  However, worse than that is that the rhymes and lines really start to go off the edge at the end.

Came in with the sword, left with the cup

Holding tight as I can onto this runaway truck

 I dunno, but it always bugs me when people use muggle objects as metaphors in wizard rock songs.  And yes, while “cup” doesn’t really have a lot of true rhyming buddies, why not go with something in the very close “upt” family, like “erupt” or “abrupt”?  I can totally see how that could work into a line about riding A FUCKING DRAGON, it’d be a hell of a lot closer a rhyme than an “uck” word, and IT WOULDN’T RANDOMLY START MENTIONING MUGGLE STUFF.  But wait, there’s more!

Feel the cool of Diagon Alley

Fly through the doors on this dragon rally

Oh God, it’s like we’re back in “Lily” again – WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN?! To be fair, I really like the first line, it evokes a feeling of the wind rushing against your face without actually saying “feeling the cool wind rushing against your face”, but the second line is nigh incomprehensible! Firstly, this couplet skullfucks the very idea of sequential time – how the hell is Harry feeling the cool of Diagon Alley BEFORE he flew out of Gringott’s doors?  Or is this some other pair of doors we’re referring too?  The famous giant doors guarding Diagon Alley perhaps?  Or maybe some doors just hanging out in the sky?  Or hell, maybe they took a quick detour to space and had to break through some SPACE DOORS?!  Or maybe, just maybe, Ministry couldn’t figure out how to end the song so they just half-assed it.  Of course even THAT doesn’t make sense because the solution is so mind-numbingly simple it makes me cry – JUST REVERSE THE DAMN LINES.  They’d almost fit perfectly with the scansion if you did so, and it wouldn’t take much pushing things around to get them to work.  And before I forget, a dragon “rally”?  Really?!  Any fucking dictionary would tell you that the noun form of “rally” means a group or gathering – WHICH MEANS MORE THAN ONE.  THERE WAS ONLY ONE DRAGON. Seriously, MoM, do we need to do counting lessons again?

Also, I decided to reread parts of canon to verify that there was indeed only one dragon mentioned in canon, and not anything that could be called a “rally”.  However, I did find a reference to “fresher air” a page before the dragon bursts through Gringott’s doors.  However, I maintain that this does not at all remove any of the stupidity of the above lines, but actually increases it!  Air was getting fresher, and I guess cooler, INSIDE GRINGOTTS, they were still many many feet below the ground, and rising, but still well away from any air from Diagon Alley!  So it makes me wonder why have that line in the first place, directly mentioning Diagon Alley when it wasn’t in canon, when ALL IT SERVES IS TO NONSENSICALLY RHYME WITH RALLY! In short, THESE. LYRICS. SUCK.  On the plus side, I ended up talking quite a bit about this song!  Hooray?

Now, a quick aside about the title, yes I already did a Magic Is Might multi-part series, but I neglected to include one part of that series – THE FUCKING REVIEW.  Yes, I did do a concise review, but I have learned that I just can’t do concise negative reviews – people will expect me to back everything up.  So, while I can understand people being like “Really? Another fucking MoM article? After all this time?” please understand that this has been sort of an Albatross ’round my neck that I’m glad to finally be getting rid of.  Also,  we are now halfway through the album, and this is already the longest article I have ever posted, and a 12,000 word article would just be ridiculous.  Check back Wednesday for the final half, and then again on Friday FOR ACTUAL CONTENT! NOT ABOUT THIS FUCKING ALBUM!  Also, today marks the 1-anniversary of this site, and everything I said in the previous article is true – thank you all SO MUCH.  Well, everything except the hiatus bit.  I’m back, baby.  So, if you made it through this mountain of verbiage, congratulations, and why not come back for more on Wednesday?  Bring your own shovel.